Comic for Monday, May 11th.

Well, technically it is up on Monday by my clock… 😀 That’s 5 whole minutes to spare.

Wednesday comic will be more on time (though maybe not old standard of whatever time that WordPress thinks midnight is though…)

I bet it is never a plot point that Peter’s phone shows system alert messages while it’s locked. Nope, bet that never comes up.

Always perplexes me how relatively rarely Peter and Naomi have shown up considering they are nominally the main characters.

I think it’s about time to do a new vote incentive but I have no idea what to draw. If you have an idea or a character from the comic you’d like me to do a bonus sketch of, leave the idea in a comment or send me a message.

Update: I’m still looking into adding a usable archive. So far not making great progress. I’ve added a button to the archive of my comic by Comic Rocket for the time being (along the top bar). Comic Rocket is a comic-framing site that contains a full index list of the pages, than while you are browsing the comic you can use the slider at the top to skip to a general section of the story. Not perfect (especially as it’s a framing solution) but better than nothing, and Comic Rocket isn’t a bad service (though not perfect), so I don’t mind linking to it for now.

That’s really the problem is that everytime there is a new character there are a dozen other stories they are part of, and it’s a careful balance between showing pieces of those and not losing main threads 🙂

As for schooling it varies. One thing to note that has been obliquely referenced a few times is both Peter and Mium are at the school in a naturalization program – ie: as students there they become citizens of Malsa (and likely remain as such should they graduate there). Likely Tyler is in the same program.

The benefit for Malsa in that is that it’s been noted that the school assists the government both directly and indirectly, and while it hasn’t been stated, it is a internationally prestigious academy; thus attracting sometimes people with rather valuable skills to the country.

From Peter’s point of view, Malsa is one of the countries that is both fairly welcoming of foreigners yet fairly terse relations with the IDS and PACT (an international alliance of private industries); and is likely unwilling to let IDS simply grab a citizen due to sovereignty issues (this was reference recently in the comic – there are loopholes).

As for the actual character motivations; Arron early on stated Peter had no love of school and was unlikely to learn anything there – Peter has rather disdainfully referred to the people of this world as “superstitious” and generally insufficiently analytically in their view of magical theory, and comes from a place that is vaguely more technologically advanced. That said, he also has shown questionable judgement in pride before 🙂

Naomi was a student here before taking the last year off to, in the words of her friend, “save the world”. What exactly that entailed isn’t clear, but it shows that she did bother coming here previously, but valued it less than saving the world.

Who knows what Mium thinks of it. That said, Naomi does want Mium to go to school, and thinks it would be education for him, but what that means is open to some interpretation.

It is unlikely the MSB was their primary motivation for coming here, though Peter was certainly aware they were located there; of note, Peter still doesn’t really take the MSB very seriously, and likely only marginally takes the Bureau seriously; while he isn’t an IDS agent anymore, he is from the IDS, and we have yet to see them take a local agency particularly seriously, beyond in patronizing diplomatic measures.

Haha, that was a really long answer to a one line question. Guess its sort of like the “world info” comments I used to do sometimes, but combined with a summary of oblique references.

Haha – well, an academy like Levinworth would have access various archives (particularly on magic techniques and theorems) that the public would not – if someone could instantly memorize data forever, you still need access to that data. I think I’ve been a little amiss at largely bypassing what actually happens at Levinworth, but hey, we are still on the first day! (That terrifies me)… 😀

That said, the coursework is probably less what she is hoping he’d learn from, but that wonders into future plot points.